"Go Tell Your Manager": Sexual Harassment in Aid Agencies

A continuing series of rants about sexual exploitation and abuse of power in the humanitarian world, submitted by a friend working at a large NGO - a friend who has requested anonymity, and asked to go by the nom de guerre 'Relief from Relief'.

So, without further ado, Relief from Relief on Sexual Harassment in Humanitarian Agencies:

It’s the dirty little secret of humanitarian agencies in the field that not every humanitarian worker is Mother Theresa. Heck, not even Mother Theresa is Mother Theresa if Christopher Hitchens and some of my friends who have worked in India are to be believed!

In 2002, in Sierra Leone there were widespread reports of humanitarian workers trading food for sex. In 2006, in Liberia, there were more allegations.

And who knows what our friends at Zoe’s Ark who “rescued” Chadian children disguised as Darfuri orphans were up to.

Donors such as the US government have started requiring that their aid be tied to making sure that there are “codes of conduct” in place and there have been initiatives to “build safer organizations”. But when you step outside of the headquarters and out of the spin zone of reports to donors and the UN, what do you see? You see organizations that are unwilling to even take the smallest steps to protect their own employees from each other.

What should be one of the basic protections in war zones (we take care of our own) is something that is belittled, minimized, and shorted when it comes to implementation.

Most female aid workers have heard the stories warning her about certain “grabby” coworkers. At a recent training I attended, female coworkers unwound by trading stories of attempted rape and sexual harassment from their country managers after nights out dancing and drinking at bars. Often the refrain from the woman was – “I made a mistake in going out drinking with him but everyone had warned me so I couldn’t say I didn’t know.”

When I spoke about this with a male coworker about it, he said – but our women are tough. I can’t imagine anyone of them not telling the guy to piss off (despite the fact that one of the stories involved a head of mission banging on the door of the young woman all night and trying to break into her bedroom).

When I mentioned that the guy had been with the organization for over ten years and that the idealistic young woman was on her very first mission, he still didn’t get it. I tried to explain to him how weird and awkward it feels when someone who is supposed to be one of the good guys does that shit to you, the first thing you do is wonder if you provoked it and read the situation wrong.

So go tell your manager, is the refrain. In my NGO, we’re told to solve the problems ourselves and then put it in writing if you can’t. But the guy was her manager. What then???

It all seems to come down to sex – and confusing sexual harassment with consensual sex. European NGOs seem particularly reluctant to “moralize” to their employees because they are not “prudes” like the US.  They seem to say - we don’t want to regulate what you do with your sex life. But its so cloudy when you live and work together – particularly when it comes to remote areas when there is little opportunity to socialize with others and when you are forbidden to socialize with the locals due to strict security regulations.

Click here to read Part 2.